The author of the column isAlexander Savinkin, our investment expert and co-founder of Howtotoken. It’s #icobusted, where we scan the market for the newest and most remarkable upcoming ICOs and analyze them in-depth, with a focus on the viability of the business concepts behind these projects. This won’t concern pre-ICO/ICO price gaps, no gasps and groans about the team, and no code checking. Here, we will try to break everything down to see if there are any market prospects for the product if, and only if, that product can be delivered.

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Quizando

Product

Quizando’s platform is simple and interesting at the same time; it follows the idea of quizzes and trivia games that were popular no so long ago and enhances their immersiveness with a watcher’s direct participation through a browser or mobile app. You answer the questions and get prizes – sounds simple enough, right?

Following the overall growth of interest from audience to online intellectual games, Quizando creates an infrastructure to deliver a varied environment for quizzes. The process is automated; you send in the entry fee and after a fixed amount of time you can participate in the quizzes organized by Quizando. There are multiple types of games you can choose from, and the Quizando token will serve as platform`s internal currency.

When the platform launches external content creators will be able to host their own quizzes and invite their own additional audience. This implies that there would be a scheme by which people gather the pool of bets and redistribute it as follows: 35% to the quiz winners, 35% to the host, and 30% to Quizando. This looks rather promising in terms of variety and further development of the by-genre industry. The Quizando token itself seems to be the equivalent of in-game currency, essentially making it a utility token.

Market

With the market having truly been created only about a year ago, it’s kind of difficult to estimate Quizardo’s further potential. The figures that Quizardo present about potential fans of this genre (500 million globally) seems possible in theory, but it’s a question of whether or not that potential can turn into the actual user audience.

As an alternative benchmark, we can use the volume of users from the statistics of Quizardo’s rival – HQ Trivia, which has its maximum at 2.5 million users per show and an average of 500,000-1,000,000 users at a time. Judging from the amount of activity on Quizando.com, it has a significantly lower volume of players, but it still seems that the market is big enough in the USA alone, and in other countries it mostly appears almost untouched. And it’s important to notice that participation in HQ Trivia games is free for users (up until now at least), and substantial prize sums are provided by the advertising partners. On the other hand, Quizando charges about $1 per a game but plans to deliver games more often and in a larger variety.

By judging HQ Trivia as the main rival we can see that they present similar products, but with almost opposite approaches. HQ Trivia has centralized sponsor-based applications and gains most of its revenue from the sponsors of the particular game rounds. On the other hand, Quizando focuses more on creating a platform solution where users prepare entertainment for users. When Quizando let content creators handle all of the processes of setting up their own quizzes by providing all the necessary means and sharing commissioner fees, the platform gets boosted with new users and hosts (content creators) gain the opportunity to monetize their efforts. At least this is the plan at Quizando. In addition, Quizandos want to make a bet on famous online celebrities (with a large audience) by inviting them as new games hosts in order to attract new subscribers.

Also, HQ Trivia is more of a local platform for the US. There are lots of emerging applications in other countries, but those markets still have a ton of room for competition. While it seems that Quizando mostly focuses on Europe, there are other local markets they can target. Still, competition is present and there are other blockchain projects that aim to emerge into this market as well.

There is also an element of a hype that drives the quiz industry, which may result in a sudden decrease of user interest as we have seen in some segments of mass culture. But this risk can be balanced by the fact that some local markets are just being introduced to the trend.

In order to assess the market trends we should mention that HQ Trivia was invested in heavily ($15 million) by the Founders Fund, which is associated with Peter Thiel.This indirectly supports the idea that the industry has potential and high expectations from investors.

Quizando gets 30% of the total participation charges from users. So, if Quizando only reaches the 1% of the client numbers that HQ Trivia has (on average about 500,000 non-unique users per day) then Quizando’s revenue may possibly reach a point of about $0.5 million a year ($0.3 x 5,000 x 365). This seems rather fair in relation to the hard cap of $1.8 million.

Summary

Quizando has yet to develop a sustainable infrastructure for the hosts (the influencers in media) and promote that platform on a large scale. And the main question here is whether Quizando will be able to deliver enough value for the quiz players to even pay the low $1 participation fee (during a time when there are some free analogues out there with substantial prizes, even though they do have advertisements).